


"But initially, he wanted to be a pirate!"

by LizCarroll2612



Series: Sherlock and Janine in Sussex [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, F/M, Sherlock and Janine in Sussex, Sussex Downs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-16
Updated: 2015-10-23
Packaged: 2018-04-26 15:47:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5010562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LizCarroll2612/pseuds/LizCarroll2612
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why Sherlock likes to visit Janine in Sussex</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "But initially, he wanted be a pirate!"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Boton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boton/gifts), [Tammany](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks once again to Boton, who (strangely enough) betaed on her own gift.
> 
> This story is inspired by Tammany's stories ["The Girl"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2544503) and ["I Shall Arise and Go Now."](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1374193) and by Boton's story ["Setting Sail"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3117992).  
> Further explanations in the endnotes to prevent spoilers.

He grew up in the countryside. His parent's house lay between fields and woods outside of a little town.

He was a pretty wild toddler and - contrary to his brother who would never have left the house if his parents and later the necessity to attend school wouldn't have forced him to - he liked to run and play outside. That seemed pretty normal for a little boy so at first his parents had thought that things would be easier with their second son.

When he got a little older they found that despite this behaviour he shared his brother's love of books. He knew all letters at three years old and started to read for himself at four.  
The brothers also shared extraordinary observational skills and the ability to draw scarily-precise conclusions from their observations and knowledge.

Soon it turned out that this combination of recklessness and intellectual skill was even more demanding than Mycroft's peculiarities had been.

Sherlock climbed onto the roof of the treehouse in the garden and jumped down without a blink. He climbed into the highest trees up to where the branches got dangerously thin. He let himself roll down the hill in front of their house with his tricycle without using the brakes.  
His mother tried to explain to him how dangerous these things were and got pretty desperate that Sherlock - who otherwise seemed so extraordinary intelligent - didn't seem to get that. Her problem was that Sherlock totally got that, even before she told him... That was the whole point….

While Mycroft smiled knowingly when he realised the vicar’s daughter didn't share the vicar's autosomal dominant hereditary metabolic disorder, Sherlock enjoyed the attention he got when he explained the implication through the microphone at the parish's summer fête.

In the beginning Mycroft had been friendly tutoring his little brother but when he realised Sherlock might be the only person who might one day come close to becoming a serious rival most of their interactions slowly transformed into fierce competitions.

Mycroft hadn't cared much for the treehouse in the garden except that he used it to sit in and read when his mother tried to force him to play outside. But Sherlock loved it. He sat in there and read and contemplated like Mycroft had. But he also climbed up and jumped down, sat on the roof and wished for different flags for the flagpole and a rope to slide down with that was added to the side on the treehouse for his birthday.

When people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up he knew the answer immediately.

Most books he owned were about pirates: Novels about their adventures as well as non-fiction children's books on the topic. 

The first flag he asked for for the flagpole had been a pirate flag.

When his parents asked him what he was playing in his treehouse they got detailed explanations about different techniques and strategies to capture an enemy ship.

When Sherlock became older his territory increased. He spent his days prowling around the surroundings of his parents' house, often sitting for hours and observing one bird’s nest or one beetle.

Other days he would spend at a nearby lake, swimming, lying naked in the grass and playing Tetris on his Game Boy while drying in the sun.  
He used to start swimming in April and continue until late October, sometimes even in the middle of the winter (although he only took shorter dips then). When his mother found out, she tried to keep him from doing that. He didn't really understand her reasoning: the water was cold.... Yes, and...? Again, that was the whole point. What were seasons for if you didn't really feel them?

Mycroft usually mostly sat at home and read when he was home from boarding school.  
On the rare occasions he accompanied Sherlock he watched him examining beetles, eating wild berries and swimming in the lake, but he never joined him. It wasn't his thing. Nature, living animals and eating things that just seconds ago had still been part of a plant were just too icky to him. Oddly Mycroft didn't make any sharp remarks about how stupid all of this was. It seemed to Sherlock that Mycroft would have liked to take part in this but just couldn't.  
Sherlock liked to show his world to Mycroft but he didn't mind to be alone either.

Some days his mother came to search for him. She always claimed she wanted to take him home so that he wouldn't be late for lunch or dinner, but Sherlock knew that she didn't really mind if he wasn't exactly on time and he had never been home significantly late.

When she found him she sat with him and let him explain which beetles he had found and how many bumblebees per minute flew in and out of the hole in the ground."Are you alright out here alone?" she asked, combing her hand through his curls. He always wondered what kind of question that was. Of course he was alright!

His life was only disturbed by the weird attempts of his parents to get him to the playground in the nearby town where he was supposed to play with other children and later of course by school. He endured the days at school, but his real life happened after half past three when he came home and on the weekends.

His mother had finally understood that, and for birthdays and Christmases he got classification guide books for animals and plants that he read in his treehouse before he slid down the rope and went off to range through the countryside.

He still liked pirates - the books now shifting from children's books to historical novels or books about the history of piracy - but his interest slowly shifted towards science.

His interest in animals finally focused on insects and spiders and he realised that everything he observed around him was basically chemistry.  
He wished for (and, thanks to his mother, got) all the books he needed to satisfy his need to understand the things around him.

He knew everything about the phosphorus and nitrogen cycles in freshwater lakes and which enzymes spiders injected into their victims to pre-digest them when at thirteen his life of ranging through fields and woods was abruptly reduced to short weeks during the holidays because he had to start boarding school.

Up to now his interest in crimes had only been a sideline that had started when he read about the use of insects in dead bodies to determine time of death. Now reading newspaper articles about crimes and letting his brain work with the gathered information was something that he could still spend his time on at boarding school.

His shorts and T-shirts (summer), jeans and hoodies (autumn and spring) or wellies, rain trousers and rain jackets (winter) were permanently replaced by a school uniform and later by the outfit he had chosen for himself when he had decided to become the Sherlock Holmes he was today - cool, distant, arrogant and enigmatic.

But now at the age of 38, after a break of 25 years, he started to slip back into this life after he had almost forgotten about it. When he threw his coat, his trousers and his shirt onto the bed and slipped into jeans and a t-shirt (that were still dirty from his last visit) he felt like an eight-year-old again.

There were differences of course.

This wasn't his life. His life was at Baker Street. His life was Sherlock Holmes who solved crimes and who was famous because his friend and flatmate wrote a blog about his cases.  
The visits in Sussex were holidays from being Sherlock Holmes. Mostly for a few days, sometimes for a week, sometimes even two.

It wasn't fields and woods he wandered through anymore but the coast and the beaches of Sussex.

He didn't just observe the insects anymore; he had taken over the beehives from Janine's old neighbour who had attended to them before.

This time he didn't need to wait for his birthday. He had money himself now to buy books about beekeeping, classification guidebooks on sea animals and on oceanography and coastal ecology.

He had a driver's licence in case he wanted to explore beach sections further away.

He didn't drink milk but black tea at breakfast, and he and Janine shared a bottle of wine after dinner in the evening.

And he now did things in the night that he of course had had no idea even existed when he used to fall asleep in his kids room after a day in the fields around his parents' house.

Janine knew she wasn't the sole reason he came here. She knew that he was happy to meet her and enjoyed her company but that the first time he had visited her she had lost him the minute he had sat down on a rock during a walk at the beach and watched a hermit crab in a tide pool change into a house of a bigger size.

When he arrived she greeted him, they kissed, he changed his clothes and disappeared to his beehives or to the beach.

He didn't mind wandering the beaches and caring for his beehives alone and she didn't mind sharing him with queen, workers and drones and with the question if the Pacific oyster might displace its native relative.

Before he left in the morning they had breakfast together overlooking the English Channel, they spend the evenings together - either at home, in the pub in Fulworth, sometimes even in a club in Eastbourne if she could persuade him - and they went to bed together, aware that neither ever expected to buy or get any ring because of any of this.

After their - whatever this was - had gone on for a little more than half a year he suddenly switched on the light again one night when she had almost fallen asleep already.

"Why don't you have a flagpole?" he asked.

"Is that... some sex thing...?" she asked sleepily.

He had been severely inexperienced for a man his age but hadn't had any problem admitting that and asking for her guidance. By now he had developed impressive skills. Janine suspected that he also googled a lot for advice once his interest had been sparked and he had developed the ambition to be good at this. So it was absolutely possible that he had come across something she hadn't even heard of before.

"What...? No! Just a flagpole! Why don't you have one?"

"I don't know, I guess I never needed one..." she answered.

"Do you want one?"

"Well, yes... Why not?"

He borrowed her car the next day and drove to the nearest hardware store and bought a flagpole, two bags of cement, a pirate flag and the flag of Sussex, the latter of which he ran up when the cement had dried.

"Why didn't you raise the pirate flag?" Janine asked when the both stood in front of her house looking up at the flag fluttering in the wind. "I thought that would have been more your style."  
"It's not the time for the pirate flag yet!" Sherlock answered. "But I can tell you when you can put it up."

From now on he used to send her text messages when he was in London that asked her to change the flag. She never got an explanation why she was supposed to do it just then, but she had learned that it was easiest to just get along with Sherlock’s quirks and when she had the time she did what he asked for.

Twice she became aware that two or three days after he asked her to raise the pirate flag there was an article in the newspaper that once more someone had been arrested with the help of the great Sherlock Holmes.

She never knew what the connection might be or if there was one at all and she never remembered to ask him.

\-------

When Sherlock had started primary school his mother thought this would be a good opportunity for a new start. She invited two boys in his class for him to play with.  
Sherlock hated the idea but his mother had told him that pirates never worked alone, that the captain of a pirate ship always had a crew. Wouldn't he like to have a crew?

It took ten minutes until Sherlock's mother heard angry shouting from the garden.  
Sherlock stood in front of his treehouse, clutching his pirate flag.

"Why can't we put it up!? It's much more fun than that one!" one of the other boys shouted pointing at the Union Jack at the flagpole.

Fun? This wasn't about fun, this was about doing it the right way!

"I explained this already, I won't tell you again!" Sherlock shouted back.

His mother tried to save the play date and in the end Sherlock had to give up.

The rest of the afternoon Sherlock lay in the grass wrapped in the Union Jack his mother had forced him to take down while the other two boys played pirates under the fluttering pirate flag.

He couldn't believe this. Pirates weren't idiots! Of course they would have the Union Jack on their ships at first because the other captains weren't idiots either: Why would they wait for a ship to approach when they immediately knew that it was a pirate ship? Pirates first raised their pirate flag when they were closing in and ready to attack.

This was the day Sherlock made the final decision that he would forever rather play alone than to have discussions with idiots. From now on he would only bother with people who were on his level and understood when pirates used to raise their flag. But he had serious doubts that he would ever meet people like that.

On second thought, he might also be able to spend time with ordinary people who trusted him with the things that he understood but they just didn't and who raised the pirate flag at the right time because they did it when he told them to.

Maybe there was a chance of meeting some of those.

\-------  


The End

(The 2nd chapter is a Meta on the background of this story, it isn't part of the story itself.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is not necessarily set in the same universe as the works mentioned above but the general idea of Sherlock continuing his relationship with Janine, enjoying his time in Sussex to get a break from his "official" life in London and maybe ending up down there with her in the end for his retirement is taken from those stories and from the thoughts in the end notes of "I Shall Arise and Go Now."
> 
> Most things I read and write in fanfictions I don't expect to really happen in the show.  
> There are the stories that are fun to read and write because it's fun to think about the possibilities but that are never even intended to be a prediction of how the show might continue. (I consider all Johnlock and Johnlockary stories to fall into that category - others might disagree here.) Even the ones that are considered to be canon stories maybe would totally fit into the show's universe, but it is just very unlikely that Moftiss are having or going to have the same ideas. So as soon as the show continues or more backstories are revealed most of those will probably not be canon anymore.
> 
> But one thing I’d really put money on (anybody interested?) is that Janine buying the cottage in Sussex - complete with beehives - was a hint that we are going to hear more about her (and her cottage and the bees).
> 
> Janine isn't necessarily the one and only possible match for Sherlock as far as I'm concerned, but at this point I think it's the possibility with most hints that it might really happen.  
> I think that Sherlock and Janine are going to continue and develop their relationship (in whatever way and intensity) and that at the end of the show we are going to see Sherlock retire in Sussex to live with Janine (with or without one (or a couple of) intended or unintended kid(s) with dark curls). It just fits too well as a possibility to end Sherlock in accordance with the original stories but with a Sherlockian twist to have just been a nice possibility to mention another little something from the ACD-books.
> 
> There will certainly not be a detailed exploration of how their (certainly unusual) romance (if that's what you'd call it) develops. I doubt that we are going to see or even get to know any of it before the very end.
> 
> I think we will just get one little last scene or maybe the Sussex-cases ("His Last Bow", "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane") with Janine included as last episode but it will come as a total surprise that Janine is still in the picture. Just in retrospect we realize that Sherlock and Janine must have been seeing each other all these years but that it just never got shown in the show. And maybe now in the end Sherlock realizes that he'd really like to live with her and finally settles in Sussex for good.
> 
> Just a guess of course but a pretty educated guess I think.
> 
> And then the whole fandom will spend the rest of eternity to figure out when and how and why they got together again and what kind of relationship they have and had.  
> And with this story I'll have a headstart for that....


	2. Meta: Thoughts about Sherlock (Holmes) in Sussex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meta: Thoughts about Sherlock (Holmes) in Sussex

This was originally part of the endnotes to this story, but I finally decided to post it as an additional chapter since it got pretty detailed.

These are some thoughts that let to this story - mainly inspired by the endnotes of Tammany’s story “I Shall Arise…” and by [this](http://221boton.tumblr.com/post/130642395254/meta-sex-and-the-single-sherlock%20) tumblr post by Boton.

I love it when the Sherlock-canon, the ACD-canon and my headcanon make sense together. And that worked out pretty well in this case I think.

Sherlock Holmes the nature-lover?  
In “The Lion’s Mane” there is the (ostensible) discrepancy, that the frantic man we know, who needs drugs to overcome his boredom when he isn't on a case, claims that he always "yearned for the soothing life of Nature during the long years spent amid the gloom of London". 

On second thought it doesn't seem that impossible to get this statement together with most of Sherlock’s (Holmes’) character traits.  
It actually fits quite well with him being a loner, his love of nature can be the basis for his interest in science and considering that he needs to physically feel the excitement of the case (or drugs, if there is no case) it can even fit with him enjoying to closely experience weather and seasons and climb trees or mountains.

From these thoughts the childhood backstory in “But initially he wanted to be a pirate!” developed and it all fits very well with the Sherlock we know, I think.

The remaining question is, why we never heard about this yearning before but were presented with a Sherlock (Holmes) who even seems to contradict this statement.

I think a possible explanation (aside from Conan Doyle being pretty sloppy about his own continuity, of course...) might be that what we get to know about Sherlock (Holmes) is basically what John (Watson) writes about him.  
Even though Sherlock (Holmes) would certainly claim that he doesn't care at all about what people think of him, I'm pretty sure he likes the image of the cool, eccentric genius and the relentless detective well suited for modern city-life, that he probably initially created himself and that was later spread broadly by Watson's stories or John's blog respectively.  
He wouldn't want any information out there that would contradict that and would certainly instruct his chronist accordingly.

That's one explanation, additionally an instruction may not even have been necessary, because Watson (Sherlock’s John to a lesser extent) seems so smitten and impressed by (Sherlock) Holmes that he himself might not always have seen the real (Sherlock) Holmes behind the figure he wrote about. And maybe there wasn’t even anything to see anymore, because Sherlock (Holmes) had already given up on his need for quiet and solitude in nature long before he met John (Watson) and never reclaimed it because it didn't fit with the role he had started to play in London.

Janine as a canon-proof possibility in accordance with the Sherlock- and the Conan-Doyle-universe  
Admittedly I needed some time and thought until I started to see the plausibility in Sherlock with Janine:  
She is pretty sociable, she isn't stupid but she's not a genius and she seems to expect a normal relationship including spending the nights at each other's places regularly and having dinner with John and Mary. Professionally she is in a completely different field than Sherlock.  
All of that doesn't exactly make her the most obvious choice for Sherlock.

On second thought though, she is more impressed than irritated by Sherlock's special skills.

Apart from concealing the reason for their relationship, Sherlock was pretty much himself and didn't hide his quirks, when they were together: She knew the chaos in his flat, she knew the intensity with which he works his cases... and she was still interested.

According to her reaction to Sherlock mentioning his marriage proposal again in the hospital scene, she wouldn't expect and want too much commitment too soon (“That was never gonna happen!”) which would certainly suit Sherlock.

In the end she takes revenge pretty resourcefully, by which Sherlock seems more impressed than hurt and after having betrayed each other terribly she and Sherlock both simply agree that they are even now and seperate pretty amicably.  
Like in the moment when John cold bloodedly shoots the cabbie in ASIP we realise that they certainly might be a better match than we and the two of them thought in the beginning.

So even if Sherlock hasn't found someone as unusual as himself, he still might have found someone who like John more appreciates then mocks his unusualness and who has certain unsettling traits himself even though they are less obvious.

To come back to my story: In Janine Sherlock might have found another person besides John who would not know on her own when it is time to raise the pirate flag but who’d raise it when Sherlock tells her to - in Sherlock’s head because they’d trust him to be so smart that he’s always right and they just do what he says - in their head (and in reality) often enough only because they want to spare themselves the discussions but also because they (contrary to many others) accept his quirks or even sometimes find them endearing.

Concerning ACD’s Holmes there is the theory that even he might actually not have been alone in Sussex: It’s based on the thought what the word "housekeeper" could have stood for at a time when a live-in-girlfriend or a cohabitee certainly wasn't an acceptable option.

If it was possible for ACD's Holmes' woman to pass as his housekeeper she must at least publicly have seemed reasonably ordinary. She can't have been an "adventuress" of the Irene-Adler-type or an active suffragette or a woman who in the Victorian era succeeded with a scientific education, which might seem appropriate companions for Holmes at first thought. 

So making Janine and not Irene Adler or some genius scientist or another obviously extraordinarily unusual person Sherlock’s girlfriend seems even very much in accordance with Conan Doyle’s original stories.

It might be the trailer for the christmas special resonating or the fact that I have watched a lot of Jeremy Brett’s Holmes recently, but I think it's an interesting thought what the Janine-and-Sherlock-in-Sussex-scenario would have looked like in Victorian or Edwardian times.


End file.
